Vehicular air bags are among the latest safety enhancements for automobiles and other vehicles. Their use in vehicles is increasing dramatically. Generally, such air bags are located within a steering wheel or column, dashboard, control panel, or other out-of-the-way location which is near a vehicle's occupant. Sensors located in the vehicle detect when a crash is occurring and activate the air bag(s). When activated, the air bags rapidly inflate between the vehicle's occupant and a potentially injurious or deadly surface, such as a steering wheel. As the crash progresses, the force of the crash may hurl the occupant toward the injurious or deadly surface, but the occupant first encounters the air bag, which prevents or otherwise lessens injury to the occupant.
In order for the air bag to be effective, it must be stored in an out-of-the-way location until needed. Moreover, it must be stored in such a manner that it can be rapidly activated to do its job. Due to the continual down-sizing of vehicles, the out-of-the-way locations where air bags are typically located are usually rather small. Thus, an air bag must be folded into a small package so that it fits into a small location. But, the technique used to fold the air bag affects its deployment when activated. To minimize the possibility of harm to a vehicle occupant, the air bag preferably deploys evenly in a spreading out (side-to-side) manner rather than shooting first toward one side then the other or shooting straight out then filling in from side-to-side.
The conventional process for folding vehicular air bags relies almost exclusively on manual labor. This conventional process is plagued with problems. For example, approximately 12 minutes are required to fold an air bag using manual labor. With the large number of air bags now being used in vehicles, a tremendous amount of labor and expense is required to fold air bags. Moreover, the folding of air bags requires a large number of highly repetitive manual motions. Such repetitive motions are potentially hazardous to the health of the manual laborers. In addition, such repetitive motions lead to boredom, which in turn leads to a poor performance of the job.
Another problem relates to the consistency with which bags are folded using the conventional process. While some bags get folded acceptably, others tend to be folded using a less-than-optimal folding pattern or in a manner which results in an overly large package. This lack of consistency results in a considerable amount of rework, which is expensive, and inconsistent bag deployment patterns, which may pose unnecessary dangers to vehicle occupants.
While a few automated processes have been developed to automatically fold air bags, the automated processes have their own problems. In particular, the folding of the air bag should not introduce contaminants into the bag. Such contaminants can possibly degrade the bag over time and cause the air bag to be defective when needed. Accordingly, automated processes tend either to forego inflating the bag during the folding process or to utilize extensive filtering to purify any air entering the bag during folding. When bag inflation is omitted, many desirable fold patterns cannot be achieved. When bag inflating is used to push top and bottom bag layers apart, large quantities of air must be filtered. Moreover, air pressures tend to excessively fluctuate when parts of an air bag are tucked into an inflated portion of the bag. Air pressure increases experienced during such tucking operations can potentially over-stress air bags.